With the successful construction of a GPT4 co-worker, we can now talk to emacs. (And also understand how disturbingly simple it is to build one – read on!) WARNING The AI can make mistakes and you might say something horrible on accident like “Man, I hate my harddrive!” I hope you understand the ramifications 😀 With a voice interface, ask the AI to do work or answer questions for you in the context of the current buffer (file/directory). The AI will do the job asynchronously out of the way, leaving you to move on to the next task while the AI plugs away and speaks to you about its completed task. Demo: The code is posted at https://github.com/pv-pterab-s/emacs-pinky-saver. It requires some …
Checkpoint and Restore Emacs into Immortality
TL;DR. An Emacs death is horrible to endure. Checkpoint Emacs’ state at regular intervals to bring it back to life with CRIU. Yup, CRIU can handle Emacs, now! The steps, nowadays, are simple and this post quickly outlines the constraints and the commands to make it work. This post is short and to the point. The build choices, configurations, etc. have been stripped again and again to make things as simple as possible. Also, these instructions are given for a recent Ubuntu in order to be more canonical 😄 Make a Place for bins at ~/.bin Grab an Emacs without DBUS Grab CRIU Configure Emacs Your immortal Emacs will be in daemon mode and will talk with emacsclients over a …
Learn Pipes via Old Serial Terminals with Your Kid
TL;DR. A lab for STEM middle school students using vintage serial terminals to illustrate that: computers communicate by sending numbers, numbers arrive one by one in order (serial), numbers travel over wires (pipes). These notes include links to materials and instructions that take you and a student through (1) connecting a serial terminal to a computer, (2) configuration, (3) playing with pipes by sending messages, and (4) logging into a serial Linux console to see how pipes scale! This is the latest in our series of education-with-old-hardware posts beginning with “Build a 486 Bootloader with Your Kid“. Required Materials A serial terminal like one of: A Wyse terminal (link to eBay). This is the best because it uses standard serial. …
Build a 486 Bootloader with Your Kid
TL;DR. A lab at an elementary school level to illustrate to children that: computers must be instructed, instruction is stored on media, the most basic instruction is a series of numbers. These notes include links to materials and instructions that take you and a student through (1) starting linux on a vintage 486 computer, (2) assembling a boot-loader, (3) writing it to a floppy, and (4) starting a computer to show a message. Intro I built a bootloader with my children and share our work in this post. It is a lab, at an elementary school level, that you can repeat for yourself and share with the rising generation. The intent of this activity is to drive home the idea …